by Phil Rickman
‘Wrong,’ Antony said. ‘Everybody’s electrified.’
In semi-darkness, the dining room was like a derelict chapel — a dead fireplace at one end, at the other this lofty stained-glass window fogged with night and snow.
‘If you’re getting feelings of déjà vu,’ Bliss said, ‘it doesn’t hold any nice memories for me, either. As you know.’
He meant the time in October — although to Merrily, it still felt as raw as last week — when he’d asked her to talk to a particular man facing a murder charge, and she’d been dreading it and relieved when it hadn’t come off. And then the situation had turned into a free-rolling tragedy, and the guilt and remorse had kicked in.
Which was why there was no way she could say no to this one, or even think no.
The door to the hall was open, and they were standing in a narrow alley of diffused light. Bliss had been waiting when she and Gomer came back into the hotel.
‘We’ll be outside at both ends, Merrily.’
‘Tell me again. Give me all the details.’
‘There are no details. We never got that far.’
‘Then give me the outline again.’
‘She admits killing Dacre — that’s it. She keeps saying, “I killed him, what else do you want?” I say, “I want to know why.” She says, “You wouldn’t understand.” And then, after a bit, she goes, “If you do a couple of things for me, I’ll think of a full explanation for what happened, I’ll write it all down, and I won’t go back on it. I won’t ask for a lawyer and I’ll plead guilty.” And I’m saying, “But, Brigid, it won’t be the truth, will it?”
‘And she’s saying, “Whenever did the truth matter to a copper?”
‘Words to that effect. People don’t have much of an opinion of the police any more, do they? Not even convicted murderers. After I tell her I don’t think she’s actually in the best position to start demanding deals, we sit there in complete silence. Like, normally, I can sit quietly for as long as you like if I’ve got an excuse to keep staring at a lovely woman. But this one was somehow in control. Probably a status thing: the nationally famous killer and the obscure provincial detective. After about two minutes, I’m going, “All right, what is it? What are you after?” ’
Mumford’s shape in the doorway reduced the light to a corona around him.
‘Sorry to disturb you, boss, it’s as we feared: no chance of getting her into headquarters in the next four, five hours. Until daylight, in fact. Apparently, seventeen roads’ve been closed. Mostly this end of the county.’
‘Shucks.’
‘We can’t even get the body away.’
‘Where is he?’
‘In the van on the car park.’
‘You better tell all that to Howe, then.’ Bliss didn’t sound too unhappy. He turned to Merrily. ‘The Ice Maiden’s finally discovered who Natalie is. And consequently has decided the interrogation requires a woman’s touch. Looks like you’ll have to do. She’d hate that, wouldn’t she?’
‘Frannie…’
‘Remind me to compliment the esteemed leader of Hereford Council on putting all our money into new shopping centres instead of winter maintenance. We have the lady to ourselves. Let’s dance the night away.’
‘What did she say when you asked her what she was after?’
‘She said, “I’d like to see my daughter, alone, as soon as you can arrange it, and I’d also like, at some point, to talk to a Church of England minister called the Reverend Merrily Watkins.” Naturally, I ask her why and naturally she declines to tell me. And when I write down this vicar’s name I ask her to spell it because, naturally, we’re unacquainted.’
‘Why do I still get the feeling you engineered this?’
‘It’s what she said, Merrily, I swear to God.’
‘She didn’t mention Jane?’
‘No, thankfully she didn’t mention Jane.’
‘It sounds as if she doesn’t know I’m here.’
‘Then let’s surprise her,’ Bliss said. ‘For some reason that escapes me, despite all my training, experience and natural flair some people seem to prefer to unburden themselves to you. I’m not proud. It could save time.’
‘And if she tells me things in strict confidence?’
‘Then you can tell her what a basically nice, understanding person I am and how much better she’d feel sharing it all with me — as distinct from the cold-hearted friggin’ bitch awaiting her over in Hereford, should she decide to hold out.’
Merrily looked at the connecting door to the lounge. ‘Can I make a call before I go in? I need to… make sure things are OK at home.’
‘We have all the time in the world,’ Bliss said.
The sound of the breathing was like a recording, amplified, as though the tomb was an echo chamber, and something had reanimated the ancient corpse in there.
Most of her upper body was fused to the broken side of the tomb. Her legs were buried, and a weight of snow had collected in her lap like ice cream heaped in a bowl.
Only an inscripted slab of stone, long ago dislodged, had protected her face from the snow, and in the torchlight it was as florid as Lol remembered. Her tongue was out, and there was a spittle ring around her mouth, a dab of froth in one corner of her lips, bubbling when the breath came through.
Alive, though.
Tough ole bat.
Lol knelt down in the snow, brushing and pulling it away with both hands, uncovering a pink, quilted coat done up on the wrong buttons.
Whispering, ‘Alice…?’
All she did by way of reply was to go on breathing through her mouth, the air siphoned out in the gap alongside her protruding tongue.
Even her breath seemed cold.
She’d had a stroke. He’d seen this before — in one of the day rooms at the psychiatric hospital, a woman with schizophrenia having a stroke in an armchair in front of the TV, and her breathing filling the room. He remembered another patient going to turn up the telly.
He peered into her face: lopsided, like half of it had collapsed, her eyes closed. The colours of Alice’s face, when you thought about it, had always suggested high blood pressure.
Her’s likely wandered off. What they do, her age, minds start goin’.
Lol began furiously to shovel the snow out of Alice’s lap with cupped hands, then began digging out her lower legs, cold as marble.
The woman in the armchair, the white-coats had been very careful how they moved her. That was in a centrally heated day room.
How long had Alice been here? An hour?
She should be dead.
He bent and put an arm under her shoulders, prising them from the tomb. He unzipped his parka, pulled it off and put it around her shoulders, digging with his other hand to find the crook of her knees, until she came up in his arms, shedding her shroud of snow.
Knowing, all the time, that Dexter Harris had to be watching him from somewhere close.
44
Sanctuary
The easy chair and the sofa had been placed at right angles under the brass-stemmed Victorian standard lamp, an intimate enclosure at the fireplace end of the long lounge. There was a coffee table with two coffees on it, served by the thickset policewoman whom Bliss had called Alma.
‘I thought I could wait just inside the door,’ Alma said to Merrily. ‘It’s a big room — I’m not going to hear anything you don’t want me to. I can sit there and read the paper.’
Merrily took off her coat and folded it over an arm of the sofa. ‘Wouldn’t it be possible for you to leave us completely alone?’
‘I still might have to keep looking in on you. Got my instructions.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Brigid Parsons said from the armchair, ‘what am I gonna do, hold her hostage? Strangle her with her dog collar?’
‘Not wearing one,’ Merrily said. ‘You’d have to garrotte me with the chain of my cross.’
Alma didn’t smile. Someone had thrown a fresh green log on the fire, making smoke a
nd hiss and spiteful yellow flames.
‘Blimey.’ Brigid Parsons stretched out her long legs to the fireplace. ‘You really are Jane’s mother, aren’t you?’
‘If you want anything,’ Alma said, ‘don’t come out. Call me and I’ll come in.’ She glanced over her shoulder before she went out of the lounge door. The fire cracked and let go a fusillade of sparks. Brigid Parsons stood up quickly and stamped on a firefly speck on the carpet.
‘Ben Foley. Tight-arsed in all the wrong directions. I mean, come on — what’s a bag of coal cost?’ She sat down again. She wore tight jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt, with two or three buttons open, displaying a silver pendant in the form of what looked like an owl. A grey cardigan hung around her shoulders. She pushed back a strand of dark brown hair from over an eye. ‘Jane finally got you in?’
‘Indirectly. Which is the way it is with Jane. She doesn’t actively work against you, she’s just… indirect.’
‘She’s a good kid. I like Jane. She’s got a lively mind. Unlike poor little Clancy, but whose fault is that?’
Merrily sat down at the end of the sofa, near her coat. ‘Does she know? Clancy?’
‘About me? Yeah. Yeah, she does. I wasn’t going to tell her yet, I was gonna wait till she left school. I mean, I’d always found it surprisingly easy, not telling her — you walk out of prison into single-parent accommodation and a new identity, and that was kind of hard to get used to, so I used to practise on her. Telling her all about the new me before she was even old enough to understand what on earth I was on about. By the time she was two, the old me was history. Sorted.’
‘Why were you going to wait till she left school?’
‘Oh… because… Well, for a start, because Clancy isn’t like Jane, who’d see it as a big challenge. But also, if I waited till she was eighteen she’d have the option to walk away.’
‘From you?’
‘If she wanted to.’
‘Why did you tell her?’ Merrily drank some coffee. It was good. Amber Foley, Stanner Hall’s only asset. ‘Did somebody get on to you — the press?’
‘Nah, nothing like that. I mean, there was some of that, quite a few years ago — media trouble — when Clancy was little, and I had to change the name again — to Craven; when we ended up in Craven Arms, it was like a bad joke. It was a problem, for me, getting used to another surname. Less so for her. I think she thought it was something everybody had to do every few years. Excuse me, but are those cigs sticking out of your coat pocket?’
‘Want one?’ Merrily pulled out her Silk Cut and the Zippo.
‘Thanks. It’s a big thing when you first get out, not having to let one of the screws feel you up just to get yourself a fresh packet.’ She took a cigarette and Merrily lit it for her. ‘I’m sorry, I’m being flip. I don’t feel flip. I feel like shit, naturally.’
‘I can imagine.’
Brigid inhaled a lot of smoke and let it out slowly. ‘Reason I told Clancy about Brigid, and the reason, basically, that we came here, was that a kid at school — a boy — was taking the piss out of Clan because she was quite a bit behind the others. We’d moved around a lot, with my jobs, and we’d just come up from Cornwall, and she’d got behind, and this kid was like, “Oh you’re backward, you’re ESN.” Taunting her. I think he fancied her, actually — you know the oblique way they approach things at that age. How was he to know what a raw spot this was? So, anyway, she stuck a Biro in his eye.’
‘Oh.’
‘I mean, like really stuck it in. This wasn’t one of your classroom semi-accidents. Some of the kids from school would go down the chip shop at lunchtime, and she walked up to him in the street while he was eating his chips and she just stuck the flaming pen in his eye. I mean hard. Hard enough that he needed surgery to save his sight in that eye. The police were involved for a while, but there was no charge. But word gets out, obviously, and I had a call from my old minder, Ellie, who was actually the detective who’d arrested me. And Ellie’s like, what you gonna do about this? And she didn’t know the half of it. She didn’t know about Hattie. But she saw a dangerous parallel. I’m assuming you know what I mean.’
‘I think so.’ He lost an eye, Stuart, did you know?
‘So we sat down one night last spring, Clan and me, and I told her. We sat there just like this, drinking coffee — only it was a bloody sight warmer, of course. It was after dawn before we went to bed — together, like sisters. And she never went back to that school, and that was when we came down here to live with Jeremy.’
Brigid Parsons sat up and looked around vaguely, then leaned forward and tipped half an inch of ash into the grate. Merrily realized that she’d hardly stopped talking since the policewoman had left them alone.
‘That was a bit of an ice-breaker, wasn’t it?’ Brigid said.
Merrily felt very odd. It had been like two old mates catching up: the so-called woman of God and the woman who, as a teenager, had lured a boy into some derelict industrial building and inflicted upon him… was it forty-seven stab wounds?
‘They haven’t actually arrested me,’ Brigid said. ‘Or do I mean charged? Someone like me, they don’t know how to play it. It’s like asking the Queen if she needs the toilet. The red-haired Scouser said, “We’ve brought you in to ask you some questions, that’s all.” I just said, “I did it.” He’s like, what? And you could tell he’d rather I’d said, “Piss off, copper, you got nothing on me” like he presumably gets from everybody else. He looks at me like he can’t wait to get my clothes off and into a plastic bag.’
‘You told Bliss you killed Dacre?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘And did you?’
‘Unless it turns out he had a heart attack on his way down, yeah.’
‘Why?’
‘It doesn’t matter why. He’s dead, I killed him. End of story. I’m not looking for absolution. Harold Shipman’s banged up for killing about three hundred of his patients, but nobody knows why he did it.’
‘That’s because he hasn’t even admitted doing it.’
‘He’s a doctor. Those bastards never admit killing anybody even by accident.’
‘Was this an accident?’ Merrily asked.
‘Hey, listen, I’ve already been more cooperative than Dr Shipman. And I was also more selective. And I didn’t want to talk about this to you, I wanted to talk about Clancy. Can I have another of those?’
‘Help yourself.’
‘Ta.’ Brigid picked up the Zippo from the coffee table and lit her own cigarette this time, leaning back with it. ‘Merrily — that’s a very old-fashioned vicar sort of name, isn’t it? Most women clergy seem to have these monosyllabic dykenames.’
‘I’m not.’
‘I know you’re not. You’re with this songwriter guy who was mentally ill and isn’t sure where he stands.’
‘He wasn’t mentally ill. He got sucked into the system. Would it have mattered if I’d been gay?’
‘Don’t look at me like that. I was inside for ten years, hormones squirting out everywhere. Yeah, maybe a little. She’s had enough situations to adjust to.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Clancy. How much time do we have?’
‘I don’t know. I think the head of Hereford CID wants you taken over there for questioning. She may get impatient. She may send a snowplough.’
‘She?’
‘She wouldn’t want you talking to me. I think this is the only chance we’ll get.’
‘Female authority figures — like I need another one. OK, Merrily.’ Brigid gazed steadily through the smoke. ‘Here’s the situation: I don’t belong to any church, and I’m not sure what I believe. I’ve never seen the ghost of my appalling grandmother, and I’ve never felt her looking over my shoulder. Not, I should say, for want of trying. I’d love it if we could meet. Earlier tonight — Jane’ll tell you — I mean, earlier tonight there I was lying up in her room, surrounded by creepy old photos of the bitch. The biggest one, I had to clean the glas
s and I did that by spitting in her face, over and over again. And then I lay there under her smeary picture, looking at both of us in the dressing-table mirror. Anything happen? Did it hell. No lights, no images, no sudden drops in temperature. Bitch.’
‘Why did you want to see her?’
Brigid ignored the question. ‘Last week — you’ve probably had this from Jane — Ben and I got into a confrontation with one of the shooters Sebastian hired, and he made some contemptuous remark about Jeremy. Blue light.’
She looked at Merrily for a reaction.
‘You attacked him.’
‘Ben was very gallant. He said at least people might stop calling him a poof now. He said he could understand it after the guy nearly shot Clancy at The Nant. Yeah, I… The guy wasn’t expecting it, of course, and I think the first blow must’ve smashed his nose. What I didn’t realize until Ben was pulling me away was that I had a rock in my hand. A jagged piece of what had been dressed stone, about the size of half a brick. I don’t remember picking it up — I suppose it must have been a reflex thing when Ben and I first saw him coming towards us, and we didn’t know if he was armed. And you still don’t seem surprised.’
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘Feel free to be shocked. It still shocks me, when I allow myself to think about it. Which isn’t too often, because I have to be at least halfway normal for Clancy. Naturally, I’m not unaware that this happened in roughly the place where my grandmother smashed the skull of my grandfather. But I stress that I did not feel anything. I didn’t feel her with me. You know?’
‘Does this sort of thing happen often? I mean, is it something you have to… control?’
‘I don’t think control comes into it. I’m not even an aggressive person. I mean, truly I’m not. When I was inside, nine times out of ten — no, hell, more than that — if someone had a go at me, I’d deal with it, and not in any extreme way, you know? Only on a couple of occasions in nearly ten years was there anything… And that’s being banged-up, and being banged-up can be… trying.’
‘What about the… thing that got you in there?’
Merrily recoiled. It was like two little steel shutters had come down over Brigid’s eyes.